The Aforementioned Fluorescent-Lit Bus Terminal of the Beyond
The open doors are gates numbered “1” and “2” by blue-and-white square signs above their frames. The rest of the gates along the wall are shut, their opaque doors offering no glimpse of what lies beyond.
The station is squalid; she shudders when she looks at the floor from which she so recently rose. CNN is playing on two television screens hanging from the ceiling, and speakers carry the sound to every corner of the station. The cable feed is shot and two speakers are blown. Moments ago she was optimistic, but Wolf Blitzer’s buzzing voice and ghastly stutter are beginning to give Jennie a harrowing sense of what afterlife this may be.
At that moment a grizzled gray man bursts into being three feet before her. The shock would be enough to make her heart skip a beat, were it not already quite done with beating. The man is apparently naked. His face and bust are discernible, but his torso tapers off into nothingness, and his extremities are absent. He grunts at Jennie before casting a glance at the television.
“CNN,” he mutters. “Damn mainstream media. Here of all places, they could have at least chosen something fair and balanced.” The man turns, and Jennie notices the line at the front desk as he drifts off to join it.
In the several minutes it takes to advance to the front of the line, she observes the station—this being her first experience of any sort of afterlife, she is naturally curious. New souls appear in the station every minute or so, most of them looking far older and less surprised, and Jennie feels a flash of indignation at having lost her life so young.
“How may I help you, Miss?”
Jennie approaches the desk. “I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Of course,” he eagerly replies. “Welcome to the way station of the afterlife, mid-Atlantic region. I’m Harold the Help Desk Angel.” Stress lines show behind Harold’s plastic customer-service smile. He is slight of build and hairless, with irises of a rather unnerving luminescent white. These are framed by wire-rimmed bifocal glasses.
“So,” she says, “what am I doing here?”
“This is where you board the train that takes you to the Hereafter, whichever one you’re bound for.”
“Train? You know this is a Greyhound station, right?”
“Of course. Everything you’re seeing right now is constructed from your own preconceptions. Even me—I can assure you I’m very real, but I appear differently to each passenger, as does this space. For some of your fellow deceased, this is an airport.”
Jennie scowls—why doesn’t she get an airport? “Now please,” he continues, “look inside your jacket.”
“I’m not wearing a—” Jennie feels a sudden weight on her shoulders. She glances down to find that a jacket has somehow made its way onto her.
“As I was saying, inside your jacket you will find a boarding pass. The gate number on the pass will tell us for which Destination you’re bound.”
“I don’t think I have hands,” she protests.
Harold the Help Desk Angel gives her the look of a parent trying to patiently address a toddler after yet another failure at toilet training. She makes an attempt and finds that in the absence of thought about the absence of hands, reaching is actually quite easy.
“Left breast pocket.”
She checks a second and third time, hoping to avoid another disapproving glare, then reaches inside the other pockets to be sure. “Umm,” she says, “I definitely don’t have a ticket.”
Harold sighs and prepares a patient reply, but when Jennie shows him the empty pocket, he becomes worried. “Oh, dear.” His focus shifts to the computer on the desk before him, and he enters a series of frantic keystrokes. The computer looks fifteen years outdated, and the top-left key is missing.
Beads of sweat begin to appear on Harold’s furrowed forehead. “Goodness,” he murmurs to himself, “everything was going so smoothly, nary a screamer to be heard, and now one of these…”
“These?” Jennie echoes. “What are ‘these’? I don’t want to be one of ‘these.’”
“I’m terribly sorry, miss, you’ll have to excuse me for just a moment…” Harold rises from his chair and retreats through a doorway behind his desk to an obscured office. Jennie hears his voice and another’s but cannot discern their words. Considering the month she has had, it would figure that not even her death can go smoothly.
“You’re holding up the whole line here,” grumbles the man behind her. He is warped and wrinkled and his jacket has not yet materialized. “This generation, so self-centered.”
“You just be quiet, Frank.” The woman next after Frank in line gives him a sour look. “Anyhow, we both know you’re going, and you shouldn’t be in any hurry to get there.” This ignites several minutes of vicious verbal sparring.
Jennie decides there are worse things than dying young.
She is rescued by Harold’s reappearance. Another angelic being is with him. This one appears to be of some importance; his gray-and-brown suit strikes Jennie as the attire of a pretentious Ivy League professor. This is affirmed in his manner of speech when he addresses her. “Jeannette Winters. If you would kindly follow me.”
Jennie attempts to gauge the degree of trouble in which she is about to find herself, but she finds no indication on the man’s face, largely because his face does not resemble a face so much as a very small sun. She blinks and follows him through the door.
The office is more presentable than the rest of the station. That is to say, the room is completely bare: there is nothing in it save the door through which they have just entered and a howling white Void where the far wall should be. “Have a seat,” the being says, and two folding plastic chairs fly from the Void to face each other in the center of the room.
“I, umm,” Jennie begins.
“But of course,” he replies, "my mistake.”
The folding chairs are sucked back into space, to be replaced a moment later by two massive leather recliners. A cane topped by a glass orb rushes into the angel’s hand. He sits and makes a waving motion with his free hand, and a wall rushes forward to seal off the Void. The room is still and somewhat less terrifying now, and Jennie tentatively takes her seat.
“No offense, but your face…” She squints against the light.
He raises his cane, which Jennie notices has some really intricate carvings of deer and trees and whatnot upon its shaft, and the dazzling light leaves his face to flood the glass orb atop it. “My apologies,” he says, “the limitations of human eyes slipped my mind. I only interact with Passengers directly every few decades or so. I am Rupert the Dominion, Managing Director for the Way Stations of the Americas.”
She begins to reply, but Rupert continues, “You are Jeanette Winters. It’s a pleasure to meet you. No, the pleasure is mine. You are too kind, truly. Now, as to why you are here. You’re absent a boarding pass, which occasionally results from a paperwork error by lower management. We’ve confirmed that there was no error in your case; you were not issued a boarding pass because your score falls precisely on the boundary.”
This explanation does little to address Jennie’s ignorance of what the hell is going on. “The boundary between what and what?”
“Two Destinations,” he replies, “one almost certainly more desirable than the other.”
“So we’re talking heaven and hell.” If that is the case, it appears there is at least a chance Jennie will avoid the latter. She finds this an appealing prospect.
Rupert shrugs helpfully and says, “As you will.”
Having hoped for a bit more clarity than the managing director seems willing to offer, Jennie begins to grow impatient. “So from what you’re telling me, which isn’t all that much, it sounds to me like I’m stuck in limbo because your equation is messed up. Is that pretty accurate?”
“I believe the issue here is your limited understanding of the scoring process,” Rupert replies. “No, you needn’t be embarrassed; patience wit
h human ignorance is one of our customer service goals. Allow me to explain. If it were simply an equation, your logic would hold, but you neglect that Righteousness is in fact a substance with material properties, not some mere abstraction. Thus our division must too be handled materially. Imagine, if you will, two vast spaces divided by a line the width of one quark.” He purses his lips and corrects himself, “Perhaps the width of ten quarks. A very fine line, though, rest assured. Now imagine that among these two vast spaces divided by this very fine line, billions of particles are distributed, each representing the Righteousness quotient for an individual human soul. No matter how thin the very thin line, there is a chance, given that the line has any width at all, that occasionally a particle will fall precisely upon it.”
Jennie is loath to admit that his explanation makes any semblance of sense. “So this has happened before.”
“Oh, yes,” Rupert says, “you are in fact the eighth.”
“The eighth what? The eighth today?”
“The eighth in the history of Man. This is very fortunate for both of us, because a procedure for these cases has already been established. As I’m sure you can imagine, our ways of doing things become quite set over the millennia, and it’s a veritable nightmare getting anything done if there’s no precedent for it.”
“Is the precedent to just round up and forgive the difference?” While in college, Jennie always convinced her professors to round up, and given Rupert’s professorial appearance, she figures it can’t hurt to ask. “That would be a good precedent.”
“Goodness, no. Imagine the unfairness to those who rightly passed. Our operating procedure is this: you will be allowed to revise any three days of your life, with the goal of improving your Righteousness quotient. If you achieve a superior score, you will precede to the more desirable Destination. If not,” he adds matter-of-factly, “not.”
Jennie hopes that, once returned to life, her disorientation will dissipate and she will better know what to do. “Okay,” she breathes, “improve my Righteousness quotient. Should be pretty easy. I just have to go to church more, and drink less, and give my change to those Salvation Army guys outside Wal-Mart…”
“Oh,” Rupert remarks, “the possibilities really are endless, aren’t they?”
Jennie shrugs. “Well, I mean, how many can there actually be?” She sifts through hazy recollections of Sunday school. “I’m guessing you not judging on the faith-alone thing, since there’s not really much of a gray area there.”
“But isn’t there? What of a halting faith, or a reluctant faith, or ‘ye of little faith’? There are matters of eternal security to consider; if one’s faith slowly tapers off, what then? Then there is of course the question of faith in what. Our records indicate that you were raised Christian, nominally. Is a saving faith a faith in God in the person of Christ, a faith in the resurrection, a faith in the verity of the Bible as inspired Scripture? And Christianity is, of course, but one of countless faiths. It could be that Islam or Hinduism is the true faith, but the standard is very lax and your acknowledgment of a God in any form has been found nearly sufficient.
“If your evaluation is contingent upon action, the choices are no less daunting. What constitutes a Righteous action? Are all one’s actions evaluated together, or is Administration concerned with only one action or category of action in exclusion of all others? Is it the ultimate effect of the action that is weighed, or the intent behind it? And the very mention of intent introduces one’s character and aims as a yet another realm of criteria for possible judgment. I am personally acquainted with Infinity, and when I say the possibilities are limitless, I mean just that.”
Many of these have never crossed Jennie’s mind before. “Wow. So which is it?”
“Oh,” Rupert says, “but of course I can’t tell you that.”
“What?”
“The Administration considers that sufficient signs and wonders have been placed in the world for the evaluees to discern the criterion of Righteousness for themselves. It would be terribly unfair, wouldn’t it, to design a test We believed you incapable of passing? And even more unfair to provide you with the answer key, as it were, while everyone else who passes does so without such assistance. The mere fact that you know you are being evaluated is an enormous advantage, and for that reason, the threshold score is raised to compensate. So to ensure a positive result, your performance need be substantially better this time around.” Rupert beams.
Jennie, forgetting that she does not presently possess a right hand, slams it against the arm of the recliner in frustration. Unexpectedly, this activates the chair’s massage function, but she refuses to let its soothing effect distract her. “This is the dumbest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard.
How am I even supposed to know which days of my life to revisit if you won’t tell me what I’m being graded on?”
“That’s actually a fine question,” Rupert says serenely, “but you’ll have to decide on the way. Harold needs this space to complete some end-of-shift paperwork, so I’m afraid we must be off.” Jennie prepares an indignant response, but as she inhales, the far wall falls away. The two are flung into the Void, recliners and all.